The Whistleblower Who Could Have Prevented 9/11

December 8, 2017
Submitted by: Love Knowledge
Category: Politics

The post The Whistleblower Who Could Have Prevented 9/11 appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

A congressional report found that, before September 11, 2001, intelligence agencies were poorly organized, poorly equipped, and slow to pursue clues that might have prevented that day’s terrorist attacks. The following story offers a unique insight into how that could be.

Bill Binney was, as far back as the 1960s, one of the NSA’s most distinguished analysts. He had almost a sixth sense for understanding the patterns behind the webs of relationships that would often prove to be even more valuable than the actual contents of intercepted communications.

This ability was a valuable tool in making sense of Soviet communications and intercepts. Binney’s work might very well have warned us of 9/11, and other terrorist attacks, had it been allowed to continue. Instead Binney was forced to become a whistleblower — and a crusader for both his work and the privacy protections of American citizens.

Using his methods, he anticipated the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the onset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War and even the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The funny thing was that many of his higher ups in the intelligence community didn’t take him seriously. Even after he had proved himself almost prescient, they all felt that his methods were too inexpensive and too simple to be the real thing.

As the digital age arrived and Binney moved from the Army to the NSA, he was shocked at how primitive the NSA technology was. He tried to change that.

And while many of his colleagues liked to think the Soviet threat would be around forever, he foresaw the threats from international crime and terrorism and the need for appropriate programs of information collection.

In response, he developed cutting-edge computer programs of pattern recognition, with off-the-shelf software, to try to foreshadow these threats. The problem once again was that Binney worked too cheaply.

The leaders of the NSA wanted to spend well in excess of three billion dollars for projects that were unproven, and performed poorly when tested, compared to what Binney had created — for one-tenth the cost.

That’s when higher ups at the NSA, including then-director Gen. Michael Hayden, decided that Binney and his work had to be neutralized.

The harrowing story that follows is told by Binney in his conversation with WhoWhatWhy’s Jeff Schechtman in this week’s podcast. Binney explains how his “ThinThread” program worked — how it protected privacy and passed Constitutional muster. He explains why he had to leave the agency when his work was shut down in favor of programs that didn’t work — ones that totally ignored privacy concerns, but that provided a gravy train for contractors and executives alike.

Binney’s story is the subject a new documentary, A Good American, (available on Netflix) from executive producer Oliver Stone. For the full story, in Binney’s own words, this podcast is a must.

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Full Text Transcript:

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Jeff Schechtman:	Welcome to Radio WhoWhatWhy. I’m Jeff Schechtman. Some men spend their whole lives seeking out fame and fortune. Others put their nose to the proverbial grindstone each day, do their job, and try and do it well, fairly and with integrity and with passion. They don’t seek fame or fortune, merely the satisfaction of a job well done. This is true on the assembly line or in the highest reaches of corporate America or government or even espionage.
	Often when these two kinds of men clash the collateral damage can be substantial. My guest, Bill Binney, was as far back as the 1960s one of the NSA’s most distinguished analysts. He had an almost sixth sense for understanding the mathematics behind patterns of contacts and webs of relationships that would prove to be even more valuable than the content itself.
	As his distinguished career with the NSA progressed, he would begin to combine these skills with the evolution of the digital age. It was, and he might disagree with this, the perfect coming together of a man, his talents, and the technology of the time. The problem is his superiors had other ideas, ideas about seeking fame and, more importantly, fortune. The clash would fire up his courage as a whistleblower, but it may also have caused the nation thousands of lives on 9/11 and beyond.
	This story, Bill Binney’s story, has recently been told in a new documentary out on Netflix entitled A Good American, and Bill Binney is here today to talk to us about this powerful slice of American history that is still very much a part of our search for safety and for privacy.
	Bill Binney, thanks so much for joining us here on Radio WhoWhatWhy.
Bill Binney:	Thanks, Jeff, for having me.
Jeff Schechtman:	I want to go back to the 1960s, to your early days with Army Intelligence, your early work on cryptography and trying to discern patterns to communications and contacts and networks. It was a time when you really began to evolve the idea that such networks and patterns were almost more important than the content itself.
Bill Binney:	A lot of it … When I first got into the business it was in the military, so our basic threat then was the Soviet Union. That was the big threat in the world to us, so that was where I was focused. Most of everything they did was encrypted, so you’re basically looking at relationships in the ether in terms of communications, of just basically contacts.
	We were working basically with what we now call metadata. Back then we used to call them just network analysis or net analysis or just analysis of military context basically. That meant you had to look at the relationships and patterns of relationships to try to interpret what it meant. That’s basically how it started. It meant that you could look at a lot of data just on a superficial basis, looking at just the metadata and the relationships, and that’s the kind of approach that transitions right into the digital age too.
	Because even if you couldn’t read the encryption, you could still get massive amounts of intelligence out of things, because if you had something that was in clear text you’d have that one item, and you look at the content as you’d be reading it, but it still didn’t give you the perspective of your entire range of activity, whereas if you looked at the metadata you could see your whole community of who you’re interacting with and how often.
	You could see things like if you had medical problems what doctors you were seeing. You could basically assume certain types of medical problems, depending on their specialties, things like that. You could see what things you buy and just … It’s similar to what companies are doing today except the companies are looking at the individuals only, and that’s primarily to sell you something. Whereas if you’re looking at intelligence you’re looking at groups of individuals or groups of people who are actively pursuing dope smuggling or money laundering or weapons smuggling or any kind of terrorist type activity or pedophilia or any kind of criminal activity of that nature, but it’s groups of people who are involved at that point.
Jeff Schechtman:	Using those methods, you were able early on to ascertain things that were beginning to happen, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Yom Kippur War, and even the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in ’79.
Bill Binney:	Once you have the understanding of the patterns that you’re looking at, then it becomes pretty clear what is a real threat as opposed to what is not. That’s basically what intelligence is supposed to do. It’s supposed to give you advanced notice of intentions and capabilities. Unfortunately, today they’ve seemed to have lost that perspective. Now they’re pretty much doing a forensics job, which is a police job, after the attacks.
	For example, in terrorist attacks here in Europe or back in the United States, they basically come in after the fact and say, “Yeah, we knew this guy was a bad guy,” or “he had all these connections and we knew he was on our watch list or something and we were concerned about him,” but they weren’t following them close enough to be able to stop the attacks.
	The reasons they weren’t was of course because their policy of taking bulk acquisition of data on everybody on the planet, which meant you had to dive into this ocean to try to find the fish, you know? That’s the problem. That’s basically what they’re still doing today and that’s why they’re still having trouble stopping anything.
Jeff Schechtman:	Even then when these things became clear to you and some of your colleagues at the time, there was reluctance on the part of higher ups to believe it or to act on it.
Bill Binney:	Well, yeah, and part of the problem was we … The way we developed things, we did them very efficiently. That was one of our big mistakes. So It didn’t cost a lot of money. The major managers there at NSA didn’t really like that. It didn’t support a large organization. It didn’t support a big budget. Solving the problem was not their main issue. Also their concern was making sure that the agencies and all their contracts increased year-after-year so they had a bigger budget to manage. That was the big thing for them I think.
Jeff Schechtman:	One of the ironies in all of that is that even with the desire to find reasons to spend money and to look for contractors to work with, that as you talk about, the NSA was really ill-prepared for the digital age.
Bill Binney:	They were basically fat, dumb and happy thinking the Soviet Union would continue and that would be their major threat all along so they could justify the existence of a large organization like NSA, but when they fell apart there in 1990 they got caught. At the same time, just before that, before the Soviet Union fell apart, the digital age was starting to explode, so in the late ’80s, early ’90s the explosion had already started in terms of cell phones and computers and emails and things like that and the managers at NSA were still thinking in the old mentality, we need to have the Soviet Union around so we have an opposition out there that we can look at as the threat.
	They’re doing similar things today, trying to make them look like a threat. It’s an external threat. They’re trying to do the same thing again, but it was the whole concept of we have a threat that will justify our existence so we don’t need to worry about anything else. But when it fell apart they had to look around to find out where can we find another justification for our existence, so that became the international crime, terrorism, and the internet in the digital age.